LinkedIn Hits 200 Million Registered Users Worldwide — Adding New Users At Rate Of Two Per Second

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LinkedIn has announced it has reached 200 million user registrations worldwide — with new users being added at an average rate of two per second (or 172,800 per day). Not bad for a professional social network (but obviously still a far cry from Facebook’s one billion+ active users).

LinkedIn clocked up its first 100 million members back in March 2011, underlining how its growth rate has accelerated in recent times — with the network adding more than 13 million members since its last announcement on November 1, 2012. Back in January 2009 membership stood at 32 million. However, this is total users, not monthly active users or another indicator of active engagement, as others have pointed out. The company doesn’t disclose active usage numbers.

In a blog announcing the new membership figure, Deep Nishar, LinkedIn’s senior VP of products and user experience, described it as an “important and exciting milestone”. The company has produced a celebratory infographic to mark the moment.

LinkedIn’s membership spans more than 200 countries and territories. The U.S. remains its biggest market, followed by India. Membership in its largest markets breaks down as follows:

USA (74m)

India (18m)

UK (11m)

Brazil (11m)

Canada (7m)

The fastest growing countries for LinkedIn membership are Turkey, Colombia and Indonesia, respectively. Mobile use of the site is growing fastest in China, followed by Brazil, Portugal, India and Italy.

The largest industries on LinkedIn by membership unsurprisingly include several tech-focused sectors. The largest is IT & services (with four million LinkedIn members); followed by financial services (2.03 million); higher education (1.95 million); computer software (1.65 million); and telecommunications (1.59 million). It’s a testament to the granularity of LinkedIn’s career information that its largest industry accounts for less than 2.5 per cent of its total userbase.

The most followed ‘key influencers’ on LinkedIn — a Twitter-style feature, which LinkedIn added back in the fall that allows users to receive updates from other high profile users they are interested in — are 1) businessman and entrepreneur Richard Branson; 2) U.S. President Barack Obama; 3) alternative medicine guru Deepak Chopra; 4) self-help book author Tony Robbins; and at 5) LinkedIn’s own CEO, Jeff Weiner.

LinkedIn’s membership momentum this year has been matched by rising revenue growth: its Q3 revenues were up 81 per cent year-over-year, and up 10 per cent sequentially on Q2 revenues.